The Cameroons

David Cameron seems to be going from strength to strength. Yet very little is known about his inner circle - the people who may one day help him run the country. Who exactly are they? What do they stand for? And did they all go to Eton? Andy Beckett investigates

At first glance, the high street in Witney, Oxfordshire, with its Land Rovers, teashops and well-dressed pensioners, seems an unlikely place to make a speech about gun crime and urban teenagers. But Witney is in David Cameron's constituency, and his people have managed to conjure up a suitable backdrop for him. Halfway down the street, under an elegant old porch, a cluster of boys in hooded tops cup cigarettes against the February wind. Behind them, up some stairs, is a youth charity with a graffiti-style logo and a roomful of visiting television cameras.

Cameron arrives on foot, tieless, hands in the pockets of his suit trousers, with a single young press officer at his side. Upstairs a lectern has been readied; flanked by the boys in their hoodies, the Conservative party leader speaks with his usual seductive fluency. The contradictions in his rhetoric - Britain is "a great place to live," he says at one point, "but sometimes I simply want to despair" - go unchallenged by those present. His press officer watches attentively, holding a clipboard and a thick sheaf of documents. With her youth, her long, neat coat and old-fashioned, bobbed hair, she has the air of a boarding-school headgirl. Later, as she is talking to a photographer, she puts her papers down on the stairs. For several minutes, as journalists and teenagers and charity staff push past, the pile sits unattended behind her. The sheet of paper on top is blank, yet other documents poke out from the pile and are quite legible. "OUR AIMS," begins one of them: "1. To win the 2007 local elections ..."

You get a sense, watching Cameron and his team, that for all their recent success and surface polish, there may be something fragile underneath. Close up, the operation can feel understaffed and slapdash, even amateurish. Are Cameron's people just getting away with it? And who exactly are they? In recent weeks the sense of momentum around him has increased sharply. Opinion polls have started to give the Conservatives - until now, only modestly ahead - large leads over Labour. This month, the well-connected editor of the Spectator, Matthew d'Ancona, reported in the Sunday Telegraph that "since January, the more ambitious permanent secretaries around Whitehall have started drawing up discreet plans for a Cameron government". Last month, the Electoral Commission reported that donations to the Conservatives in 2006 had increased to record levels while donations to Labour had almost halved. Among voters and MPs alike, the possibility or probability of prime minister Cameron is the subject or the subtext of almost every political conversation.

Yet while Cameron's strengths (confident directness, a degree of youth and charm, the appearance of freshness) and his favoured strategies (stagey photo opportunities, a constant succession of surprise initiatives, not producing actual policies) have become familiar, the team around him has not.

When Tony Blair transformed British politics as opposition leader in the mid-90s, his backroom fixers and frontbench lieutenants, such as Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown, had substantial public profiles of their own. Cameron's close allies, by contrast, remain vague political figures to all but the most conscientious observers. They have a catchy nickname: "the Cameroons." They make intermittent, somewhat stereotyped appearances in the press as a clique of upper-class friends from Eton and Oxford and Notting Hill. But only Cameron's chief strategist, Steve Hilton, has acquired the beginnings of Campbell-like notoriety. In the BBC4 satire The Thick of It, there is a Tory stringpuller transparently based on Hilton.

Between now and the next general election, as Cameron's personal novelty fades, and he most likely faces a new Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, who has been a feared political operator for much of the Conservative leader's life, the quality or otherwise of Cameron's lieutenants will become increasingly important, possibly decisive. How good they are, whether they really are winging it, is going to tell. And on this question informed opinions are distinctly divided.

"Steve [Hilton] is a very, very bright guy," says a former senior member of New Labour's backroom operation. "And he has a nastiness ... I mean, he is much more focused on finding the weak points in Labour than he might come across as being. But the rest of the team is very poor - a bunch of jobbing Conservative Central Office second-raters." A former Conservative press secretary also praises Hilton, and the shadow chancellor George Osborne - "one of the most impressive people I've met in politics" - but goes on: "The rest of Cameron's lot are very green, very immature. The media operation is abysmal. They have no idea how to deal with hostile commentators."

The political biographer John Campbell sees Cameron's rise as the latest in a long line of Conservative rethinks in opposition. Yet, he says, "Heath and Thatcher had more people around them than Cameron. With Cameron it is a bit of a gang of friends. And one doesn't get the sense there is an intellectual ferment going on." He fears that the Cameron project is purely presentational; that it's all about getting the Cameroons into power - not about a vision of changing Britain.

Michael Portillo, a veteran of less successful recent campaigns to reinvent the Conservative party and now a Cameron critic, questions the durability of the new Tory machine. "Cameron has been given a reasonably easy ride by the press so far. That will change. I think his team is a bit thin. It's not surprising. The Tory party has lost layer after layer of talent over the past decade or more." How does he rate the Cameroons? "They're bright and they're nice. But they don't look like killers."

If you spend much time with Cameron's people, and have experience of dealing with other political operations, the first thing that strikes you is the politeness. "Thanks so much for coming down," says one of the Conservatives' senior strategists when I meet him in Westminster, as if I have travelled from Scotland rather than a newspaper office in central London. During the hour and a half he gives me on a busy Monday, he thanks me at least twice more.

Gabby Bertin, Cameron's press officer since the latter stages of his leadership campaign, is quick to frame this new political etiquette in party terms. "People love to make the comparison between us and Labour in the 90s. We couldn't be more different. We're honest. We're transparent. We don't go around threatening people. We don't go round lying." A Cameron aide has a more worldly explanation: "In the 90s Labour seemed wet and needed to show they were tough. Our problem is the opposite."

The Cameroons occupy a suite of rooms across the road from the Houses of Parliament, in the brighter, more modern complex centred on Portcullis House. Their half dozen offices open off an enormous, high-ceilinged hallway. A pair of men's shoes - Camper, the informal, modern Spanish brand - lie casually discarded on the hall carpet. All the office doors are open.

In Cameron's there is a photograph of Winston Churchill on the wall, and a large picture of Harold Macmillan, the liberal Conservative prime minister who revitalised the party with a group of friends from Eton half a century ago. Next door to Cameron's office is Hilton's office: half a dozen desks, young men without ties, an air of unhurried purpose. Someone chats with two colleagues while swivelling back and forth on a chair in the middle of the room. Long open windows give on to a sunlit Thames. No telephones ring.

"It's a united team, a very happy team," says a former Conservative aide. "That wasn't true of a lot of leaders' courts in recent years. Iain Duncan Smith went round trying to pick the best people, but they were not necessarily believers. Cameron hasn't always chosen the best people, but they all believe in him. They all believe in the project."

In a party led until recently by Michael Howard, it is easy for the Cameroons to seem fresh and precocious. Bertin is 28 and has only been working in politics for four years. Danny Kruger, one of Cameron's two speechwriters, left university in 2000. Osborne, Hilton and the Conservatives' campaign director George Bridges are still in their 30s. Cameron's chief of staff, Edward Llewellyn, is barely 40.

Yet this impression of youthful fearlessness is a little deceptive. Like the leader himself, who is 40, has barely a line on his face but got his first job in Conservative Central Office in 1988, the Cameroons have been around.

Bridges' trajectory is typical. Like Cameron, Kruger and Llewellyn, he went to Eton. In public most of the Cameroons dismiss this as a minor biographical coincidence, but it's nothing of the sort. Eton has a unique ability to produce Conservative politicians. "Etonians have to compete for office within the school," explains the journalist and Old Etonian Nick Fraser in his recent book The Importance Of Being Eton. He quotes the former Conservative MP Jonathan Aitken: "It breeds a certain speciality of behaviour. You know how to get elected, you know how to please." Etonians have their own word for advancing yourself by networking and lobbying: they call it "oiling".

Eton is also, of course, all male. The Cameroons are also mostly men. Most of the women involved tend to be in more minor roles.

After university, Bridges joined the Conservative Research Department, another traditional staging post for young Tories. Cameron, Llewellyn, Osborne and Hilton were there, too, in the late 80s and early 90s; bonds were formed. "At moments in [Etonians'] lives," writes Fraser, "they are mysteriously available for each other."

It was an instructive time to be an apprentice Tory. The final, disastrous stage of the Thatcher era was followed by the perpetual struggle of the John Major years. Conservative politics was dominated by factions, panicking ministers and last-ditch, negative campaigns against Labour. Opportunities presented themselves for promising junior staff - which the future Cameroons were not squeamish about taking. Bridges worked on the "Labour's Tax Bombshell" campaign in the 1992 general election, Hilton on the anti-Blair "Demon Eyes" advertisements of 1996. Osborne was an adviser to the accident-prone agriculture secretary Douglas Hogg during the BSE crisis. "It was incredibly draining," says one Cameroon. "Going to bed at midnight and hearing about another news disaster. Putting your head in your hands."

Nowadays Cameron's people like to say such experiences taught them lessons that directly shape how they think and act today. They are very keen to seem calm and professional, and to avoid public splits and disagreements. They distance themselves from the rightwing press and its favoured causes, particularly immigration and Europe.

But politicians are good at rewriting their histories to fit their current thinking. In fact, the development of the Cameroon mindset was slow and halting. After the Conservative party lost power in 1997, many of them drifted for a time between rightwing Toryism and admiration for New Labour's tactics. In 1999, Hilton described a Labour television broadcast in the Observer as "propaganda that glistened with professionalism". The same year Bridges called the respected environmentalist Lord Melchett, then director of Greenpeace, "evil" and "anti-progress" in his column in the Times. Cameron's current press secretary, George Eustice, remained a prominent activist for the UK Independence Party and other Eurosceptic groups until 2003. In 2002 he publicly defended a cinema advertisement in which an actor, dressed as Hitler, endorses the euro.

With the Conservatives' prospects of returning to office apparently bleak, many of Cameron's future lieutenants stepped away from party politics for periods. Bridges took the crisis management skills he had acquired under John Major to the consultants Quiller, specialists in "challenging situations" and "reputation management". Llewellyn went to Hong Kong as an aide to the then governor Chris Patten, then to Bosnia as an adviser to Paddy Ashdown. Hilton set up Good Business, a consultancy advising companies how to be more ethical and socially responsible. He continued to express non-Tory sentiments in non-Tory publications - a mirror-image of the Blairites' strategy in opposition of talking tough in the Daily Mail. In 2001 Hilton described New Labour admiringly in this paper as "one of the great rebranding exercises of all time".

Nowadays, for all their declared distaste for New Labour's methods, Cameron's people remain respectful of Blair and his machine. Some of the admiration is personal and mutual. Hilton is friends with Tim Allan, Blair's former press officer and still an influential Blair advocate. Rachel Whetstone, Hilton's partner and a semi-detached Cameroon, is friends with Ben Wegg-Prosser, 10 Downing Street's head of strategy. Wegg-Prosser gave a reading at the wedding of the Conservative MP and Cameroon Ed Vaizey. Some of this is just the usual mingling of sharp Westminster operators with networking instincts and work in common. And, of course, both groups are united in their dislike of Brown.

But these connections also express something else: how far the two main British political parties' ideas and tactics really have converged in recent years. One common influence starkly illustrates this. The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party, a memoir and political manual first published by Labour's focus group guru, Philip Gould, in 1998, is a book many Cameroons know well. Watching the Conservative leader now, Gould's stern paragraphs about the importance of television appearances and "symbolic policies", and how political parties should change to fit society, seem almost eerily applicable. None more so than this passage about Blair in his early phase as Labour leader: "His strengths were freshness and a sense of change; confidence and self-assurance; that [he] is a new kind of politician; that [he] changes what it means to be Labour. His weaknesses were that he could be perceived as over-smooth, too soft and not tough enough, and inexperienced. In response to this, [he] should not be what he is not ... He must be a politician who always rings true."

The first signs that some Tories were considering a Blair-style modernisation of their party came as early as the mid-90s. In 1995 Hilton and Oliver Letwin, now the Conservatives' policy coordinator and an influential older Cameroon, featured fleetingly in the press as members of "The Group", an informal collective of young Tory opinion-formers who combined admiration for Margaret Thatcher with a more modern social liberalism. Over the next 10 years, other half-formed versions of what you could call Cameroon thinking came and went. In the late 90s, when William Hague was the youthful new Conservative leader, he assembled a circle of confident young advisers, Osborne prominent among them, who quickly became known for their relatively liberal views and cliquey public school manner. Unsympathetic rightwing papers quickly dubbed them "the kindergarten". During 2003 Letwin briefly became the modernisers' figurehead by combining courtly Etonian manners (he had been at the school a decade before Cameron) with support for civil liberties and other untraditional Conservative causes. The following year, "the Notting Hill set" emerged with its membership of impatient proto-Cameroons. Hilton, who was one of them, told this paper: "There is no point in pretending ... We are mates. We go on holiday ... We all worked together at Conservative Central Office ... all this 'bright young thing' stuff obscures the fact that we are actually old-timers."

In 2005 Cameron stood for the party leadership and Hilton and the others finally had a Conservative leader who could sell their modernising ideas, however vague, to the party and, quite possibly, the country. "That's why they'll bend over backwards for Cameron," says a former Hague adviser. "They've learned it doesn't matter how popular your policies are if you have an unpopular leader."

Sometimes the Cameron team's dependence on its frontman is too obvious for comfort. Earlier this month, Cameron visited another youth charity, this time in Hammersmith, in west London. The event was staged as slickly as it had been in Witney: a council-estate setting, well-behaved teenagers to meet the leader, helpful young Conservative staff to charm the journalists. But before Cameron gave his speech, David Willetts spoke in his capacity as shadow education secretary. A little stiffly, he stood at a lectern with a large projector screen beside him. A long succession of bullet points flashed up on the screen about the flaws in the government's schools policy. In his slightly fussy, slightly elderly voice, Willetts fleshed out the statistics, some of which were quite damning, with paragraphs of intricate party-political point-scoring and educational jargon. The speech seemed much longer than it was - it seemed almost to erase itself as it went on. At the question-and-answer session afterwards, virtually every inquiry was addressed to Cameron.

As for Brown, the Cameroons alternate between dismissing him as unpalatable to voters and sounding anxious about his history for destroying promising Tories' careers. "He'll be a lot more aggressive, a lot more tribal," says one Cameron aide, with a touch of distaste in his voice. "It will become much tougher for Cameron against Brown," says a former Conservative aide who watched Brown grind down Tory leader Hague at close quarters.

Thirty years before Cameron, another Conservative politician with smart subordinates and a project captured the party leadership. Margaret Thatcher retains a surprising number of fans among the Cameroons, in particular for the way she decisively changed the direction and tone of British politics during the long build-up to her election in 1979 without committing herself to many policies. Cameron's policies are due to start being announced in "the middle of this year", says one of his strategists with studied vagueness.

What those policies will add up to remains unclear even after you have spent many hours with the Cameroons. You wonder if they have really resolved between themselves what their vision should be: so far, the main thing they seem to have agreed on is that they want to be in power. In private, they are not free of the old Tory ideological divisions over the size of the state and public morality.

In the meantime, as the Blair government stumbles on, the Cameroons wage their opportunistic guerrilla campaign one week at a time. "They do operate on an incredibly short-term basis," says a well-informed Tory-watcher. "They ring up a thinktank three days in advance and say, 'Can you organise a speech? Can you organise an audience for David?' Iain Duncan Smith had a meeting with David Cameron and Steve Hilton and proposed a long-term idea about Tory MPs going to do anti-poverty work in the inner cities. They leapt on the idea. They wanted to start it in four days' time."

Cameron's people say they are on course to win the general election. One of them tells me he has to constantly stop himself looking too satisfied with how it is all going. Sometimes voters decide they want a change of government, and nothing from then on will change their minds. But the opinion polls do not confirm that this is happening now as definitively as they might. At the same stage in Blair's leadership of the opposition, he had a poll lead of 20%, double Cameron's current advantage. Were the Conservatives to win the election narrowly rather than decisively - or not win at all - the large number of Tory MPs and party members as yet unconverted to Cameroon thinking could make a lot of trouble.

A more junior team member, whose politics are to the right of his leader's, has a more long-term worry. He fears that in downplaying traditional Conservative causes, in changing the party to be more in tune with modern Britain, the Cameroons have in effect accepted that they won't change the country much in office. He cites Thatcher's prickly radicalism as a counter example: "You have to be uncomfortable in the world to want to change things."

But then he changes his tone. "I don't want to spend another five years in opposition doing this nonsense," he says with sudden fierceness. "I want to be handing policies to civil servants, not journalists." A few minutes later he gets up to leave, a confident young man in a tailored suit with things to get on with. The Cameroons are not really a clique or a nice new kind of Tory. They are part of a tribe accustomed to running Britain. They think it is well past time they had another turn.